Architecture of Cities: The Watermelon Man’s Belle Époque

Decades have come and gone: My camera has been steeped in delicious: Steeped in time: Steeped in history: Miracles for my heart’s eyes: Cities became common exposures: Experiences became common: I realized I was not listening, enough:

Jazz musician Herbie Hancock wanted to write a song about the Black experience: He had known the history: He knew the sounds he had heard, but not the rhythm nor melody that could become a sound, a song: He listened acutely to the cobblestone back alleys of Chicago: He learned: The Watermelon Man became a sound, a song:

Listening for sounds reminds me of sounds heard and sound seen: I heard the dead in Babi Yar scream as they moved underfoot: I saw sounds of revolution as I past by the Potemkin stairs of Odessa: I imagined William Shakespeare: I stood aside the reconstructed “Globe”: I listened for the spilling beer and applause: I was hoping for a sonnet to be heard: I froze my stride in Moscow’s Red Square: What was I listening for: I listened: I reimagined China, in Shenzhen: What was I listening for: I wanted to see my unknown China:My dreams live in three dimensional sectors: My dreams live among the realities of others: My camera rekindles the love of our past/present not yet lived by me:

Gravity’s Rainbow:

“…with a face on every mountainside,

And a Soul on ev’ry stone…”

Thomas Pynchon

I have imagined I lived inside the lives of astrophysicists and anthropologists: I imagine the future I relive the past: Everything is on the table: I merely have to place one foot in every direction and follow with my second foot:

All I am doing is manipulating my camera to hear the sounds and see before me our past:

I have heard the lessons of joy from Henry Miller’s everything: I have dreamed about “…Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” I have imagined myself taking a winter’s farm life in O.E. Rølvaag’s “Giants in the Earth:

I have been everywhere and anywhere to hear my own “Watermelon Man” To hear the sounds that others make and “snippety-snap-snap”: I have dreamed about the stars over the Nile: I have walked atop streets not yet made: I have walked atop streets not yet excavated: Sounds not yet emanating appear:I have not heard; maybe the Watermelon Man’s cobblestone’s: Then some more and again I “snippety-snap snap.”

Somewhere in time I was in the dream from Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural.” I graced the luxuries and crimes in Hilary Mantels’ other century dramas: Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov carried my eyes and, to real embellished fictions:

Imagine if you will to be on a corner with the immensity of industrial noises imbuing my film with more not known, yet: Imagine if you will to be standing alone at the “Four Corners” intersection: Sounds not heard yet are moving onward: Imagine the sounds never heard are what only your camera hears.

The Unisphere: New York City World’s Fair

There is the Belle Époch: A beautiful era: There is no such thing: The camera rises to capture as any champion must do: To succeed, is to discover: There is a sweet spot ahead: It is not just a victory to capture; In failure there is some success: Rewards from century to century shift: We accommodate our dreams and hopes: We want all of our time here’s Belle Époch/a beautiful era:A century of World’s Fairs; The Great Exhibition of 1851: The 1889 Exposition Universelle; Chicago’s World’s Cumbrian Exposition of 1893; are only mere dates: The beautiful era only becomes when the stones unturned reveal: Mountainsides afore: History before me and then some more are heard by some but not all: Ahead is our beautiful era

The camera does not see my Watermelon Man: My camera merely hears The Watermelon Man and awaits: My camera on steroids achingly listens: The next or another discovery is ahead: The Beautiful Eras, The Belle Épochs are memories our hearts, minds and eyes leech on: It is a secure place to enjoin our history’s link to us in the now: Every era must be beautiful because it is ours: Silly sad to diminish the now:

Allow me time for light: Allow me the time to photograph the past ahead: Allow me the time to capture; the heroic or the common: There are no miracles in sight: A mere arousal is ahead: A freedom to see the world: Sounds are near, we have yet to expose.